The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Holds Among Young Players: A Commentary on the Vishkin (2022) Study

Abstract

Vishkin (2022) shows that female participation in chess is lower in more gender equal countries (the “gender-equality paradox”) but that this relation is driven by the mean age of the players in a country, which makes it more of an epiphenomenon than a real paradox. Relying on the same data on competitive chess players ( N = 768,480 from 91 countries) as well as on data on 15-year-old students ( N = 312,571 from 64 countries), we show that the gender-equality paradox for chess holds among young players. The paradox also remains on the whole population of chess players when controlling for the age of the players at the individual rather than at the country level or when controlling for age differences across countries. Therefore, there is a gender-equality paradox in chess that is not entirely driven by a generational shift mechanism as argued by Vishkin (2022), and previous explanations for the paradox cannot be dismissed.